The Sheldon Glacier with Mount Barre in the background, is seen from Ryder Bay near Rothera Research Station, Adelaide Island, Antarctica, in this NASA handout photo.

OSLO, Norway Global warming is expanding the extent of sea ice around Antarctica in winter in a paradoxical shift caused by cold plumes of summer melt water that re freeze fast when temperatures drop, according to a study <a href=http://www.blackfridaytiffany2014.com>tiffany and co outlet</a> unveiled Sunday.

An increasing summer thaw of ice on the edges of Antarctica, twinned with less than expected snowfall on the frozen continent, is also adding slightly to sea level rise in a threat to low lying areas around the world, it said.

Climate scientists have been struggling to explain why sea ice around Antarctica has been growing, reaching a record extent in the winter of 2010, when ice on the Arctic Ocean at the other end of <a href=http://www.tiffanyoutlet-2014.com>tiffany and co outlet</a> the planet shrank to a record low in 2012.

Sinead Farrell / NASA

Ice floes are shown at the foot of an iceberg in Antarctica's Amundsen Sea in October 2010.

"This is caused by melting of the ice sheets from below," he told Reuters of the findings in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Ice is made of fresh water and, when ice shelves on the fringes of Antarctica thaw in summer because of upwellings of warming sea water, the meltwater <a href=http://www.saclouisvuittonparis.org>louis vuitton sac</a> forms a cool layer that floats on the denser, warmer salty sea water below, the study said.

In winter, the melt water readily turns to ice because it freezes at zero degrees Celsius, above sea water at 2C (28.4F).

At a winter maximum in September, ice on the sea around Antarctica covers about 19 million sq kms (7.3 million sq miles), <a href=http://www.tiffanyoutletstore1.co.uk>tiffany and co uk</a> bigger than Antarctica's land area. It then melts away into the ocean as summer approaches.

Among other scientists, Paul Holland of the British Antarctic Survey stuck to his findings last year that a shift in winds linked to climate change was blowing a layer of melt water further out to sea and adding to winter ice.

"The <a href=http://www.sacchanelpascher2014.com>chanel sac</a> possibility remains that the real increase is the sum of wind driven and melt water driven effects, of course. That would be my best guess, with the melt water effect being the smaller of the two," he said.

Bintanja's study also said the cool melt water layer may limit the amount of water sucked from the oceans that falls as snow on Antarctica. Cold air can <a href=http://www.tiffanyoutletstore1.co.uk>tiffany and co uk</a> hold less moisture than warm.

The panel's main scenarios assume that Antarctica alone will make sea levels fall by between 2 and 14 cms this century because more snowfall will extract water from the sea.

But Sunday's study said that Antarctica was losing about 250 billion tonnes of ice a year equivalent to 0.07 millimetre(0.003 inch) of sea level rise a year, Bintanja said. "Antarctic mass loss seems to be accelerating," it said.

Another study in Nature Geoscience said Antarctica's snowfall had been over estimated by between 11 and 36.5 billion tonnes a year because of fierce winds blasting many regions.